Top 10 Improvements in Moodle 3.1

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Big news in the Moodle world, as the release of Moodle 3.1 is almost here! Set for Monday May 23rd, this long awaited release comes equipped with significant enhancements, additions, and improvements based on requests, and pains expressed by the Moodle community. Here are 10 (of the many!) improvements you have to look forward to with the release of Moodle 3.1.

# 1) Site administrators can now specify what information they’d like to include in the email subject, including but not limited to short names, full names, and site names.

# 2) Global Search is now available in Forums, Wiki’s,, and other content, so learners can look for particular files, resources, throughout the site.

# 3) Recycle Bin plugin is now part of the Standard Moodle distribution, which allows an admin to recover any deletions of course module and activities. The recycle bin will list the items that can be recovered with the title, and the date deleted.

# 4) In Assignments, the folder structure in student submissions will be maintained when downloading all of the submissions as a ZIP file.

# 5) Within forums, you can now “pin” discussions to keep them at the top of the discussion list, making them easily visible to everyone. You can now also add permalink options to forum posts - in other words, you can now directly link to other forum posts within your post.

# 6) Within Folders, you can now bulk download all files as a ZIP file, from within the folder activity.

# 7) Calendar events will now show duration within the calendar block. This will make due dates, quiz times, and assignment deadlines more clear to users.

# 8) Moodle will now rationalize confirmations when you start a quiz. Currently, anytime a user takes a quiz, whether it’s time-sensitive or not, they will see a prompt that says, “Are you sure you want to start a quiz now?” In Moodle 3.1, the prompt will only pop up if the quiz has a time limit.

# 9) Also within quizzes, Moodle will display the correct answers for administrators when they are manually grading automatically marked questions.

# 10) Competency based learning and frameworks have been added as an organizational tool. This works through templates and plans, each consisting of a set of competencies that must be achieved by learners, and will determine their learning proficiency.

It’s important to note, that with the release of 3.1 (A Long Term Release, supported for 3 years), Moodle 2.8 becomes a legacy release, meaning that Moodle versions 2.8 and lower are no longer supported - with the exception of the Long Term Release 2.7 which becomes legacy in May.

Want to learn more? Register for our webinar, where we will be providing a live demonstration of Moodle 3.1's new and improved features!

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